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By Thomas J. SheeranASSOCIATED PRESS • Saturday June 15, 2013 5:12 AM

CLEVELAND — A state crime laboratory is checking new evidence to determine whether there were
additional victims of a man charged with kidnapping three women and raping them in his home over a
decade, the Ohio attorney general said yesterday.

“We’ve received some additional evidence, but that would be normal,” Attorney General Mike
DeWine said in a phone interview. He declined to specify the nature or source of the new
evidence.

“We are well on our way. We’ve processed a lot of the evidence already. We have a ways to go,
but we’re making very good progress with it.”

Ariel Castro, 52, has pleaded not guilty to 329 counts in an indictment that covers August 2002,
when the first victim disappeared, to February 2007. More charges could be filed in the case that
cracked May 6 when one woman escaped Castro’s house, leading to the rescue of the other two.

DeWine said results of the evidence review would be turned over to Cleveland police.

Police referred questions to the office of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty, who is
directing a grand-jury investigation. A spokeswoman for McGinty said in an email “there is nothing
further to report” on the case.

So far, Castro has been indicted on 139 counts of rape, 177 counts of kidnapping, seven counts
of gross sexual imposition, three counts of felonious assault and one count of possession of
criminal tools.

The indictment alleges that Castro held the women captive, sometimes chaining them to a pole in
a basement, to a bedroom heater or inside a van. It says one of the women tried to escape and he
assaulted her with a vacuum cord around her neck.

Castro has been held on $8 million bail and has turned down media interview requests.

He was arrested shortly after one of the women broke through a door and yelled to neighbors for
help.

She told a police dispatcher in a dramatic 911 call: “I’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been missing
for 10 years, and I’m, I’m here, I’m free now.”